The Boys Who Lived
by Lucillia
Summary: Shortly after defeating Lord Voldemort, Harry Potter is summoned by Lily Evans Dursley to a universe in which the son of Petunia Evans and Peter Pettigrew became the Boy-Who-Lived.
1. Chapter 1

Lily Dursley tried to live a normal life despite the fact that neither she, her son Harry, nor her nephew Dudley were normal at all. The identical houses along Privet Drive concealed a great deal; behind the walls of #4 was a witch who had turned her back on the wizarding world and two underage wizards who were currently on Summer break from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Today however, Lily was doing something that was as far from normal as possible, even in the wizarding world. It was for her nephew, the Boy-Who-Lived that she was doing this.

Ancient tomes in Latin, Greek, and Runes were spread about her usually pristine living-room, and a summoning circle had been drawn into the carpet where her rather expensive glass-topped coffee table had been. After nearly an hour of chanting the words that would bring the being she wished to call forth across the worlds, a shape began to form. When the long invocation had ended, she backed away in surprise for the person she had expected to be there wasn't and someone else was there in his staid.

To understand how Lily got herself in this position, one would have to go back to her last year at Hogwarts when she had been dating James Potter....

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Peter Pettigrew sat in the kitchen of the Evans home on Christmas Eve sneaking freshly-baked buscuits as they cooled. He had been invited over with the rest of the Marauders by Lily's mother. He pulled his hand away from the tray as if it were on fire when he heard the kitchen door slam. A crying woman who he assumed was Lily's older sister entered. As he listened to the sobs of the young woman who had not yet noticed him, he debated whether to sneak away quietly before she noticed him or whether to go and comfort her.

Screwing up the courage that he had not been known for for the first time in a long time, he walked over to her.

Over the following year, Peter and Petunia wrote to each-other even after James and Lily's relationship had exploded spectacularly in the Great Hall after Easter break with accusations of everything from Amortentia use to false promises made by both parties. It was through these letters in which both had expressed their doubts about everything from their friends to their places in the world that a relationship was formed. It was thanks to this relationship that Petunia was able to go against her family's expectations of her, and Peter was finally able to grow the backbone he lacked. After he graduated, Peter began to date Petunia who was two years his senior.

Due to the closeness of both families amongst other things, it was expected that one of the Evans sisters would marry Vernon Dursley. Until the Christmas of 1977, it had been a forgone conclusion that it would be Petunia. Instead, a Lily who had become rather disillusioned with the wizarding world and desired to leave married him two months after graduation. She had lost her best friend and first love to the Death-Eaters due to her own rash actions after he had lashed out at her while the Jerk Potter tortured him. The boy she had thought she loved (the Jerk Potter himself) but hadn't really had made her last months at Hogwarts a living hell and turned most of her friends against her. It was due in part to this, and mostly because of the dark wizards who were trying to destroy her kind (muggleborns) and all they represented that she wanted to forget the magical word.

Petunia however had found her prince in the form of one Peter Pettigrew who still couldn't believe his luck. They were married on the first day of Autumn 1979 in a beautiful ceremony in which fall foliage in bright yellows, oranges, and reds fell around them under a miraculously cloudless sky. That Christmas, both she and Lily both announced that they were expecting (Lily sometime in June, and herself either in late July or early August).

Had Peter never found Petunia, he probably would never have been able to muster up the courage to directly refuse Voldemort's request that he join him three times and he probably would not have had to go into hiding with his wife and son. If he hadn't gone into hiding, Sirius Black would not have been tortured to death protecting the secret of the Pettigrews' location. If Sirius Black hadn't been tortured to death, they would not have had to select a new Secret Keeper. If they hadn't chosen a member of the order at random so neither of Peter's two remaining friends would be killed, they would not have been betrayed by a person who turned out to be a spy. If they hadn't been betrayed Dudley James Pettigrew born on July 31, 1980 would not have become the Boy-Who-Lived.

On the morning of November 2, 1981 when Lily Dursley found her nephew on her doorstep along with the milk she cursed the wizards who had been stupid enough to leave him out all night with only a blanket to keep him warm. Dudley spent the next ten years being warned of the wizarding world and its expectations of him by his aunt who had cut ties with said world. The young boy who ended up becoming a Hufflepuff did not entirely believe her until his first year at Hogwarts, at the end of which he ended up facing the disembodied Lord Voldemort who had been living in the back of Professor Quirrel's head.

It is because of Dudley's encounter with Voldemort that Lily was sitting in front of the summoning circle in the middle of her living-room floor doing magic for the first time in more than a decade. When she had decided to summon a Boy-Who-Lived from a reality where he had already succeeded in order to help her Nephew, she had expected either an older version of her nephew, or a bigger and more confident Neville Longbottom. She did not however expect a younger version of James Potter.


	2. Chapter 2

Harry James Potter, who had only just begun to recover from the aftermath of defeating the most feared Dark Lord in well over a century (Grindlewald had been downgraded due to his dealings with an insane muggle) after almost a year on the run, had not expected to find himself in an alternate version of his old home on Privet drive sitting across from his mother who was looking at him with a pinched expression that he had usually associated with his Aunt Petunia.

Looking around the living-room, he could confidently say that had their positions been reversed, his mother would never have treated Petunia's child the way that Petunia had treated hers. In every family portrait, there were two boys, a dark auburn haired boy with almost no neck who was a roughly even mix of muscle and fat, and a smaller, slightly pudgy boy who bore a striking resemblance to Pettigrew that had a rather familiar scar on his forehead.

It had been for this slightly pudgy child who looked a bit like Neville had during their first year that he had been called to this strange world. When he had first found himself in the summoning circle, he had pulled his wand believing the situation to have been a trap laid by the few remaining Death Eaters that had yet to be rounded up. After his spell had rebounded at the edge of the circle and almost hit him, he managed to calm himself down if only so he didn't accidentally kill himself. It was only after Lily Dursley had told him a story that was so insane that it could possibly be true and secured several vows that he would not harm her family and friends that he had been released from the circle.

He was now sitting on a rather delicate looking chair in a rather tastefully decorated living-room pretending to drink tea that was rapidly going cold while he stared at the woman who in another lifetime had been his mother, and wondering if he wanted to help the son of a traitor fufill a destiny that he wouldn't wish on his worst enemy. Deciding that the silence was becoming too oppressive, he asked the other question that had been bothering him.

"Er...What exactly happened between you and my father?" he asked, fidgeting and hoping the answer wouldn't be too painful.

Lily's scowl and cold response detailing every last one of James Potter's failings told him that he had clearly asked the wrong question.

"So," Lily said in a falsely sweet tone as she looked like Petunia going in for the kill "How exactly did _you _end up being the Boy-Who-Lived?"

He winced. She knew he didn't want to talk about that. Apparently that was precisely why she had asked.

"My parents, Your and James Potter's counterparts in my universe, got married right out of Hogwarts. They joined the Order of the Pheonix. You obviously know about the prophesy. When they went into hiding, they decided to go under the Fidelious. They had planned to use my Godfather Sirius as Secret Keeper, but he pointed out that he was too obvious a choice and would work better as a decoy leading the Death Eaters on a merry chase away from the true Secret Keeper. Pettigrew became the Secret Keeper, and he obviously didn't have whatever it was that caused him to refuse Voldemort, much less defy him three times. I bet you can guess the rest, just substitute a James Potter who tried to hold off Voldemort for Pettigrew, and you for Petunia as the sacrifice." Harry replied.

"So you lived with Black then." Lily said getting that pinched expression on her face once more. Since Black had survived, it was a forgone conclusion that he had raised Harry to be as cruel as he and his jerk of a father were.

"No. Everyone believed that Sirius was the Secret Keeper. Sirius went after Pettigrew who yelled that Sirius betrayed my parents, and blew up a street killing a dozen muggles before turning into a rat and escaping into the sewers. When the Aurors came for Sirius they believed that he had killed the muggles as well as betrayed my parents. He was thrown into Azkaban without a trial. I was sent to live with my Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon." Harry replied.

"Well they at least seem to have raised you properly." Lily said.

"Yeah, sure, making me sleep in a cupboard for ten years, feeding me scraps, having me do all of the chores while their son Dudley grew to the size of a whale while he sat around doing nothing, that was real proper." Harry retorted "The nicest thing that any one of them said to me was that I'm not a waste of space, and that was Dudley who said it."

There was the sound of china breaking as Lily's teacup fell to the floor as she stood up absolutely furious.

"LIAR!" she roared. "If I could do the spell again and get someone else, I'd send you away in an instant!"

Seeing the look of pain in Harry's eyes before he ran off, she realized that everything he had said was true. There had been a world where she had been so selfish that she had uncaringly torn Petunia away from her true love so she could be with that Jerk James Potter. There was a world where Petunia was forced to marry Vernon in order to pay the debt that had been accrued when the Dursleys had payed her Hogwarts tuition. Her family hadn't had the money to pay the Dursleys, and since Vernon - who needed half a dozen calming potions to be manageable - was unlikely to find a wife on his own the agreement had been for one of the Evans daughters to marry him in order for all debts to be forgiven.

There was a world in which she had totally ruined Petunia's life, and her own son had been forced to pay for it.


	3. Chapter 3

Harry kicked a rock as he walked to the park he'd frequented on occasion to escape his hateful relatives. Having his own mother, or rather her counterpart disbelieve him when he'd told her of the abuse he'd only recently started opening up about really stung. What hurt the most though, had been the way she hadn't even wanted to look at him, how she hated him for being James Potter's son just as Professor Snape had.

If he wanted to get out of this bizarre world where his own mother hated him, he would have to do the task that he had been summoned for. By exiting the summoning circle, he had entered himself into an unbreakable contract. Hopefully the task wouldn't take the seven years it had back home. The fact that the Pettigrew child had faced Professor Quirrel/Voldemort while trying to protect that gigantic charmed garnet that Flamel handed over when Dumbledore had requested the Philosopher's stone was a promising sign that things weren't too different.

Getting Hufflepuff's cup from the Lestrange vault would be tricky, but if the deceased Sirius Black had died without any children and done for this world's Dudley what he had done for him in his universe he wouldn't have to break into Gringotts if he played his cards right.

That was for the future however, for now he would go to his favorite swing set to calm himself down and get his thoughts in order. Seeing his mother or at least a facsimile of his mother behaving like Aunt Petunia had been disturbing to say the least. It was strange that in this universe his aunt became the saint his mother was generally regarded as by the wizarding world. The only difference he could really think of was that she hadn't married Uncle Vernon. Maybe that was the key. There was probably something about Vernon that caused any woman who married him to go from saint to bitch in no time flat.

It was as he neared the swings he noticed that one of them was already occupied by a small boy who on closer inspection greatly resembled the occupant of several of the photographs that lined the living-room walls of the Dursley home.

The boy looked up at him and apparently noticed his scar, since when his eyes reached his forehead his jaw dropped. As he moved to sit on the swing next to the boy, the child finally found his voice.

"Aunt Lily did it!" the boy breathed in awe.

"If you're referring to her yanking me out of my home universe to deal with someone I never wanted to or even expected to see again, then yes, Lily did it." he said.

"Are my parents alive where you're from? Did you know them?" the boy asked eagerly, having apparently ignored his anger at being forcibly drawn from his home to deal with something that was no longer his problem.

Those questions had probably been burning through the child's mind ever since he had heard what his aunt was planning to do, and he didn't know how to respond to them or even if he should. How do you tell a nearly twelve year old child that if things had been different, his parents would not have been the heroes that he'd been raised hearing about? How do you tell the child that you hated both of his parents' counterparts because they were evil, traitorous, backstabbing bastards each in their own way? How do you tell a child that his father would have betrayed his best friends who would have died for him? How do you tell a child that his mother would have made her nephew's life a living hell out of spite and jealousy?

After several moments of silent thought that seemed to stretch out for an eternity, he had finally found how to answer.

"Let me tell you about two people who would have been very different had they not met each-other..."


	4. Chapter 4

Dudley sat picking at his dinner that night as he contemplated the story that the man who looked like a younger version of Charlus and Dorea Potter's father had told him. It was strange hearing about a world where Aunt Lily was dead, and his mother had been alive and married to Uncle Vernon instead of his father. Even worse, without his mother to love him, be there for him, and show him how to stand up for himself and become his own man, his father had turned into a sniveling coward who clung to the coattails of the biggest bully around much as he had done at Hogwarts.

Dudley had few illusions about the man from whom his middle name had come, the man he'd been partially named after. While James Potter had grown up to be a good and well respected man, he had left behind a number of scars on those he had harmed before he'd matured enough to realize the consequences of his actions. Back when James Potter had been in school, he'd been the biggest bully in Gryffindor. Part of the reason his father had become James' friend in the beginning had been out of fear of what James would do to him if he weren't. When they grew up, and his father had begun to stand as an equal in his own right rather than as a hanger-on, the friendship had tightened as the Marauders had stood together as comrades in arms.

Now that he thought about it, he could see his father potentially going the other way, the way that Harry Potter had described, and it disturbed him. There had been many ways that his parents' relationship could have gone wrong, especially considering the fact that his mother had been exceedingly jealous of those who possessed magical talent when his parents had met. If that had happened, he most definitely would not have been born, and his father could have quite likely traded James Potter for Lord Voldemort as Voldemort was the stronger of the two.

Fortunately for him, none of that had happened. But learning about a world where it had happened, and seeing how it could have happened in his own world was upsetting to say the least.

Nobody at the table commented on the fact that he was picking at his food, but that was probably because nobody wanted to be the first to break the strained silence that had fallen over the dinner table. The reason for that silence was sitting next to him because he'd begged him to come home with him for dinner until he'd relented. Now that he was here at the dinner table, he understood why the other "Child of Prophesy had been reluctant to come with him.

His cousin Harry - won't that be confusing now that there were two Harrys who could both be considered his cousin - had spent most of the meal looking back and forth between him, the other Harry, and his parents. Aunt Lily was tense because she'd had some sort of row with the older Harry. Uncle Vernon was unhappy because Harry had come from a world where Aunt Lily married someone else, amongst other things. That, and the boy was a stranger who had no blood ties to him and possibly a threat to the family. Despite his numerous character faults - some of which required potions to correct - Uncle Vernon cared deeply for his family, and was very protective of them. It had taken a bit of time for Uncle Vernon to warm up to him because of the numerous things he'd represented to the man.

The Dursley and the Evans families had been close. Vernon Dursley's father had been childhood friends with his grandfather. When his grandfather and Uncle Vernon's father had gone out in the world, the Dursleys had prospered to a degree while the Evanses had remained at the lower end of the middle class just above the poverty line. They still remained friends though.

The Dursleys had ended up loaning his grandfather the money for both Lily and Petunia's school tuition (though they didn't know what school Lily was going to), as his grandfather had refused to take it as a gift feeling that it smacked a little too much of charity. His grandfather had done his best to repay the loan but eventually found he could not, as he had fallen ill for a long while sometime around Aunt Lily's third year, wiping out what little savings the family had and then some because he'd been unable to work, causing the family to end up in a state where they were living from month to month.

His grandfather offered to have one of his daughters married off to the Dursleys' son in repayment of the loan. The Dursleys agreed, as they weren't certain that their son would be able to find a good wife since he wasn't the best looking or sharpest tool in the shed, and both Evans girls were of impeccable character as far as they knew.

When his grandfather had made the suggestion, it had been something of a Slytherin move, as he noticed that Uncle Vernon had taken a liking to his mother and his mother had seemed to like him back. His grandfather had figured that the marriage would be a foregone conclusion irregardless. Something happened however. His mother and Uncle Vernon had had a fight over something one Christmas, and his mother had ended up running into his father who had been dragged along to Christmas dinner at the Evanses by his friends when his friend James had been dating Aunt Lily.

There had been an even bigger fight when his mother had discovered that his father had planned on erasing the family debt by marrying her off to Uncle Vernon, and that the largest part of the debt had been Aunt Lily's schooling rather than her own. When it was all over, there had been absolutely no chance of reconciliation between his mother and Uncle Vernon as far as his mother was concerned, much less marriage.

After Aunt Lily had graduated Hogwarts, and turned her back on the magical world when she realized that she had no place in it despite the powers she had been born with, she had married Uncle Vernon out of a sense of duty towards her family and as a final break from the world she had spent seven years in. The marriage hadn't been an act of love on Uncle Vernon's part either, as his parents had pressured him to marry Aunt Lily, and he did so in order to not disappoint his father who had been dying of cancer at the time. Over the years, Uncle Vernon and Aunt Lily had become rather fond of each-other, and probably would die for the other if the situation called for it, but they weren't "In Love" with each-other.

When he had arrived on his aunt and uncle's doorstep, he had represented a threat to the family to Uncle Vernon because he was a target that any number of people wouldn't hesitate to take the Dursleys out in order to get. He had represented something else as well, because Uncle Vernon had actually loved his mother.

Part of the tension this evening had been as a result of Uncle Vernon learning that there actually had been a world where his mother had loved him back and married him.


End file.
